Task for Tasker that speaks the weather forecast [Download]

Lately I’ve been lending a hand to someone trying to make a Tasker task that speaks the weather forecast out loud and can be used with other tasks, like a good morning task, or a DIY voice assistant. This is similar to what there’s a tutorial for in the Tasker wiki, but while that one is outdated, this one works.

Difficulty level: Medium. Meant for existing Tasker users that know the basics of Tasker, but with task download and instructions provided for easy implementation

Download the task from below. Two versions are available, a direct .xml download and a zipped version. On some devices, you can go to this page in your browser, long click on the .xml download, select “save link”, open it once downloaded, and then select to open with Tasker. If that doesn’t work, download the .zip, and unzip it to the Tasker/tasks folder manually. The resulting steps are identical regardless of which of these methods you use:

Go into Tasker, long click on the Tasks tab, select Import. Select the Weather task.

Open the task, then the HTTP Get action. Switch out YYYYYYY in the Path field with your location. This can be a US zip code, State/City, or Country/City. Examples are 90210, CA/San_Francisco, and Norway/Hamar – with the slashes included. Then, switch out XXXXXXXXX with a Wunderground API key. You can get such a key for free by signing up for Wunderground: http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/

Make sure there are no spaces or other “irregularities” when you insert the API. The resulting Path field should look something like this:

api/123a123b123c/conditions/forecast/q/Norway/Hamar.xml

The bold text indicates the pieces you replaced.

Finally, go into the Say action, click on the magnifying glass next to Engine:Voice, and select a Text To Speech engine that you have installed.

That’s it. Now the task should report the current and upcoming weather forecast when used. You can then implement it in other profiles either directly or using Task/Perform Task to run it from within another task.

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About the Author

Andreas Ødegård was an associate editor at Pocketables. He’s more interested in aftermarket (and user created) software and hardware than chasing the latest gadgets and tends to stick with his choice of device for a long time as a result of that. Currently that includes an iPad mini and a Samsung Galaxy S II.

Nice thread! There are all these Tasker profiles spread all over the net, I wish there was a better portal for collecting them- the Tasker wiki isn’t exactly high tech

Christina

This was complicated to work out (for me). In time I hope to be an expert task maker, but like anything, I know it takes a lot of work and practice (and many moments of frustration and wanting to throw the phone at the wall). Once fluent in Taskerese, though, imagine how much can be done with it. The possibilities are endless! Great article, Andreas! I’m glad that your helping me led to an opportunity for others to be helped as well. :)

Rob Hayes

Thanks for this… I wish I knew how to make it in Celcius, though.

Anony Mouse

Rob, it is very simple and only requires changing one thing. In the task, action 3. It says Variable Split Name %Weather Splitter <![CDATA[ Add "_metric" (without quotation marks) to the splitter. It will look like <![CDATA[

Save and done. :)

Anony Mouse

Hrmmm… it didn’t post due to the coding but it will look like fcttext_metric (add the around fcttext_metric).

HildyJ

For those in the United States, NOAA offers a very nice, all text, seven day forecast which is easier to manipulate than WeatherBug and doesn’t require signing up.

Go to Weather.Gov, enter your zipcode, click “Text Only Forecast” at the bottom of the page.

Using Noaa as a variable and “” as a splitter, the forecast starts in Noaa4. Before Amy reads it to me, I use the HTML to Text option in the Variable Convert action to get rid of the HTML code.

HildyJ

I knew I should have added spaces. The splitter is an HTML tag (for bold on):

” ” without the quotes or spaces.

HildyJ

Dammit. It’s

LessThan b GreaterThan

(mess up that you stupid comment system)

Andreas Ødegård

It’s html, and html that’s supported by the comments, hence why it hits the fan.

Basically:
< .b.> without the periods

Andreas Ødegård

That’s a great tip. I use a different source personally too, a local source that is hopefully more accurate.

Ben

Hy Andreas, i use your weather.tsk, and i really like it. I come from hungary, i speak english a little bit, and if a can, i would like this weather in hungarian language. Can i set the language to hungarian, or not?

Ken

I’m having trouble getting the Wunderground API key, so I was trying the NOAA, but the details for making that change are insufficient for me. Could you let me know which fields in Andreas’ weather task need to be changed?

Ken

I tinkered with the stuff for Wunderground, works great now.
I was wondering if there was a way to stop this mid “speak”, Once in a while it is speaking the weather and I’d like it to stop. I looked through things to try and figure it out, but I’m not sure what I should be looking for. Any ideas?

Steve

Nice guide, will attempt giving it a shot soon. I wouldn’t imagine it’d be too hard but have you tried using get GPS location, storing that in a variable and then replacing the YYYYYYYYY with the variable? That way it’d be really useful if you travelled around a lot.